Flying high on the West Coast, HELLO COSMOS evoke Stateside adventure and launch new EP with... TURN OFF THE NEWS
Following their 2021 debut album, Dream Harder, and extensive collaborative legacy projects, Hello Cosmos complete their Keep Digging EP
Working at the nucleus of a new Stockport ideas factory, incorporating the Cosmic Glue label, the band’s ‘creative family’ ethos holds firm
Hello Cosmos – TURN OFF THE NEWS OUT NOW From the Keep Digging EP www.hellocosmos.com
After cruising California and mooching Manhattan, boundary-breaking, multi-media, seven— miles-from-Manchester collective, Hello Cosmos complete their latest EP with the impatient, jagged urgency of Turn off the news. The fifth and final track to be released from the Keep Digging EP – OUT NOW - the first collection of music released by the band since their 2023 remix album, Hard Dirt, with new music comes a bold vision for the band, their Cosmic Glue label and their future live experience.
Acutely observational with no small sense of wonder and disdain, pulling in equal measure, for the world around us, the words, motivations and energy of Hello Cosmos’s central figure, Ben Robinson (founder of the UK’s Kendal Calling festival) beat from Turn off the news uncompromising core. Pulling at free lyrical and musical threads that have wound together into a coherent, occasionally challenging whole, drawing comparisons to Sleaford Mods, Idles and LCD Soundsystem, Robinson and Hello Cosmos’s anger, joy and wonder at creative happenstance pulses along in time to Keep Digging’s all-too-brief, mind-widening journey.
‘Turn Off The News’ lands as the first single from what will be the first full-band album since their acclaimed debut, currently due for release early next year.
With the initial recording taking place the day after England departed from the EU, the track developed from a studio session reflective of the dark, doomy and intense atmosphere throughout the country's inner cities with the original working title ‘The Day After’. As the track progressed via sessions at Greenmount Studios with the band's producer Jamie Lockheart during 2020, vocals developed around themes of negative news stories and who they serve, resulting in the title ‘Turn off The News’.
Laced with unsettling static, dramatic violins and thrashing guitar licks complimented by the punk poetry vocal style of a town crier challenging the status quo, ‘Turn off The News’ takes aim at greed and manipulation. “Divided and confused we were tainted by hate.”, “Like lambs to the slaughter of the daily papers.”
About the track vocalist Ben Robinson says;
“The story of this song threads through some dark times for me personally, the UK and the globe.
I always aim to be positive with Hello Cosmos vocals, writing from a place of sadness or negativity is much easier than making a positive statement interesting. But this track was a sign of the times so I went through my darker lyric notes, a lot had been written in the harder moments of lockdown, the 5 o’clock updates from Witty and Borris, the Twitter rabbit holes of info on how PPE contracts had been abused, the whole circus show of Hancock and the media shitshow surrounding UK politics. This is where the title of the track comes from, at that time the news was so unhealthy and was constant, it wasn’t helping people it was beating us down with doom and paranoia constantly, while the media was celebrating having something to run with that had the attention of the world....
Frustrating times all bottled up, so I took every bit of my anger and went into the vocal booth for the first scream I’d done since lockdown happened, I channelled everything I could into that chorus and let it all out, what you hear is the first and only take.”
An open family, porous to diverse ideas, Hello Cosmos works outwards from the steady, four- piece membership of Robinson and his drummer brother, Simon Robinson plus Angela Chan of Placebo/Lanterns On The Lake and Adrian Ingham, also of Deathretro.
Written and recorded over a two-year period, the Keep Digging EP and yet-to-be-announced, upcoming releases from Hello Cosmos, were created at Greenmount Studio in Leeds as well as in Manchester, New York, Florida, Los Angeles and Stockport.
For up-to-date information on all Hello Cosmos releases and ticket news, connect with the band online at:
